However, the book is quite wonderful as soon as the child's trajectory is similar to that of Ursus. The characters are all interesting but rare since they are not about to caricatures: Hugo describes perfectly their vices, their doubts and wonders without ever falling into the honeyed description or coarse denunciation. But these characters are not important in themselves: they are merely incarnations of a number of typical figures of society of the late seventeenth century. This is where Hugo hits hard.
He hits hard, as he draws, with extreme finesse, with an enjoyable and chilling irony at a time, the features of an England not so different from the one we know. A proud England, conquering, wealthy on one side and the other absolutely miserable, hypocritical England, who claims the freedom of all and nobility of each, while continuing to knock small to allow large to continue frolic. Hugo feasts when he delivers his vision of the Queen of England, which even then was earning a fortune for doing nothing, or makes soliloquize Ursus about the state of the world, greatness the great and the small small. Great historian but also great sociologist Hugo had understood that allowing large claim to be great, that's what La Boétie called "voluntary servitude." But here, the little ones are not fooled, these are not just puppets, and Ursus embodies perfectly this ordinary intelligence, intelligence that this popular historians often ignore their books, those who prefer to do a story that is made a hero of history, a history of "big", strengthening a little more the idea that a handful of geniuses would have made the world as we know it ...
Hugo thus restored order and fairness with Ursus, which moves in the depths of the social ladder but so far shown great intelligence and extreme lucidity on the world, proof s' it is that one sees sometimes much more "down" than "up" - evidence, therefore, that any idea of social hierarchy carries in itself the seeds of injustice. Ursus is a ventriloquist, a great ventriloquist, but this quality is only a metaphor for the ability he has to understand the world, understand the young and old, and to understand that to stay alive in this England riddled with injustice and arbitrariness, the only course open to him is to please the one and the other, and, if possible, to satisfy always primarily those who have the power of law with them, it ' ie the rich. Ursus is the man who bears the parasites of the world - the English lords and all their cliques below - being aware that these people are precisely the true parasites. The misery of the world comes from the omnipotence of some: this, Ursus knows. He knows that nothing can change it, but the mere knowledge is already the beginning of a possible revolt. And this is what we mean Hugo wants: that among those being crushed, it still will be born of intelligence, and that the time will come when they will have precedence over the foolishness and pillage of the world by lazy aristocrats that are of interest only their stories of heart and their stupid labels.
In the end, The Man Who Laughs is a book that makes a highly virulent social criticism though much more underground way that metaphor in Les Misérables. This book is, as I have the book, a prose poem, an extremely fine poem, in which Hugo confronts person directly, but actually goes much further, by focusing on how an entire society from top to bottom, of the greatest things to the most intimate details, can be corrupted and "rotten" in the very biological sense, by the power granted to those who do not deserve it.
And then we understand better the title, The Man Who Laughs. The Man Who Laughs is Ursus is Hugo, the man who understood that the world marched on the head. but the man who laughs is also the child disfigured with knives by royal surgeons, the child who, on this as there are more personal and more individual for every human being - his face - Door the marks of social injustice and arbitrariness of those who dominate the world of tyrannical manner, despicable, hateful and deeply dehumanizing.
In short, a book that, like those of Hugo, is more relevant than ever!
